Super Smash Bro’s Ultimate’s singleplayer is extremely impressive

I thought Smash Ultimate's World of Light was gonna be pretty lame when it was announced, that it would be just a glorified set of event battles on a world map. I never messed around much with event battles or classic mode in the past smash games so I was expecting the same to be true for World of Light. But after playing it for a while I actually think it's a really impressive labor of love that still manages to be fun and creative several hours in. It's amazing to me how much work must have been done to give each spirit its own unique battle and abilities. While some of the fights are more interesting than others, and many of them might rely a little too heavily on pitting you against a large group of heavily buffed fighters that spam projectiles, (looking at you, Ninten and Deep Breathing) given the challenge of creating interesting and occasionally difficult fights within a primarily multiplayer fighting engine I still think the end result is really impressive.

The amount of variety and breadth present in the spirit system really surprised me as well. Every spirit has their own set of stats or abilities (and occasionally both) that range from the sensible (Metal Sonic making you go faster) to the darkly hilarious (Paz from Metal Gear Solid starting you with a bomb.) You can fuse your spirits to create new ones, evolve certain spirits to become stronger, train them at Dojos to gain new attributes, or send them to Doc Louis to train. It's essentially a fully featured 25 hour long (if a bit shallow) monster raising JRPG contained within Smash. There are interesting choices to make occasionally for the harder Spirit battles, such as whether or not to prioritize abilities that allow you to circumvent mechanics such as strong wind or a specific status ailment, or choosing to maximize your characters strengths and play around those elements. There's also a fun customizable difficulty element, where being weaker compared to the Spirit you're facing will grant more items and money, allowing you to choose between a more difficult but more rewarding battle, or an easy one that provides less loot. These are fun, meaningful choices to make! This is all layered on top of a beautiful, enormous world map that's fun to explore and a fighting game that already provides a mindboggling amount of content.

I don't want to make it sound like I think World of Light is perfect, because it definitely has flaws. The fights are repetitive, the choices I described above are too rare compared to the ones with obviously correct answers. The difficulty curve is completely out of whack, with balls hard fights right next to ones that are brain dead easy. The abilities provided by spirits are shallow and one note. Despite how great Smash is as a multiplayer fighting game, its still very evident that it is not suited for a singleplayer JRPG. But getting hung up on these faults is to miss the forest for the tree's I think. The fact that these flaws exist only shows just how incredible World of Light really is. Sakurai and Co have created a 25 hour, monster raising JRPG that has meaningful choices, fast paced, satisfying combat, interesting character development systems, and a large and fun to explore open world – and then shoved it inside an already massive fighting game. Despite World of Lights flaws, it has one thing going for it that offsets all of them. It's free. This mode, so insane in its scale that I feel it could've been released as a 20 dollar standalone product without the combat and just be a number comparison game and still own bones, is just a side offering to game that I would guess almost everyone with an interest in would have purchased happily if it didn't exist. It's present in this game despite its predecessor notably lacking a significant amount of singleplayer content and still being received incredibly positively. Ultimate would easily be the largest game in the series without World of Light, and yet the developers still decided to include a singleplayer mode that dwarfs ones prior in the series in scale. It's such an obvious labor of love, a passion project, something that didn't need to exist but but does just because the developers wanted it to that I can't help but love it despite its flaws. I hope the huge amount of effort and love poured into this mode doesn't go unnoticed, because I think it's really something remarkable.

So for those who don't know, this is how you can play online currently on smash with Strangers: Create preferred rules and wait for a quick match, where matchmaking will put you up against someone who 'closely' matches your rules. Create an online lobby called an Arena for you and up to 7 other players…

So TIL that the enigmatic cache not only rolls around the galaxy, giving your planets some research boost, but also can give the "uplifted" trait to the least advanced species, giving them a massive bonus in research income. However, it is incompatible to other traits that give you bonuses on research and leader xp, and…

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